A symphony of influence, impact, and the world around us - in conversation with Excise Dept about their debut album "Sab Kuch Mil Gaya Mujhe vol. 1"

Interviewed by Zarah Noorani (@zarahnoorani)

When we found out about the upcoming release of SAB KUCH MIL GAYA MUJHE vol. 1, I knew I had to sit down and listen to each track very carefully. Every song off this album brings something so special and characteristic to the listener. With this, Excise Dept has managed to make their debut Sab Kuch Mil Gaya Mujhe vol 1., exactly what it needs to be and more - impactful, fresh, and most importantly, fun! Ahead of the release of the album, I had a chance to sit down with Andrew Sabu, Rounak Maiti, and Karanjit Singh (missing Siddhanth Vetekar!) for a long and extremely interesting chat about creative influence, a sense of sync with each other, and the impact of doing one's thing.

How’s it going so far? It’s almost release day! Do you have something planned or is it going to be business as usual?

Andrew - We’re actually all together today so we’re just going to keep it chill. We’re only getting together with some close friends to celebrate the release of the album. 

Starting off, I did catch something very, very interesting in your press kit which said “this is a chaotic album, for chaotic times”. As a listener, I have my own interpretation of that, but I’d like to hear it from the source - where did this come from?

Rounak - For one, all of us come from very different worlds and there’s a host of influences that go into this. Between our practices, we’re all very different, and on top of that, we’re referencing various different themes and pulling things from our observations. So in that sense, we’re embracing the fact that it makes it a little more chaotic and there are a lot of different influences coming into this album. 

As individuals, I mean, I’ve been doing music a long time, Sid has been a session player for a while and KJ’s whole practice is more visual and photo/video oriented - so there’s a lot of different styles of work going into it. Also, if we look at it culturally, we’re led by experiences in our personal lives living in India and the US. KJ’s experience as a Sikh person, mine as a Bengali and someone who has lived in the US, and not to mention our shared love for pop culture, memes and the internet where a lot of stuff excites us. We’re quite rough around the edges, and musically at least, we’re not presenting something so easily definable. Visually, we might come off as a little bit more focused, but sonically we’re exactly that. 

Andrew - And that can also be seen in the tracks. I mean, the first and the last tracks are 6-minute ambient pieces whereas the central part of the album changes and shifts so much that sonically, it’s an amalgamation of those ideas and themes. 

KJ - We actually started making music sort of as a joke. And this happened in December 2019, just before the pandemic, and more importantly, JUST before the CAA protests began. These guys were about to go to a music festival and we had written something jokingly. When we came back from the festival, it just felt like there was this huge shift in how people were engaging online with Indian politics, and one after the other we felt the temperature of the room rising - with COVID being on the horizon and everyone’s world moving to their screens, constantly being fed the news of all these things happening not only in the country, but also the world. Everything since then, if you think about it, the CAA protests, the farmers’ protest, events we all watched at home while the pandemic was raging on. Then came the things the government was saying about this, what our families were talking about, and also the many rumours that started making the rounds, so for me, at least, that was the space was found myself being pulled into. Also, looking at how when you’re a Sikh person, you often get put into these characterized roles and I was writing and pulling a lot from that while still not placing myself in that exact position, but instead taking from my ideas of community that may feel unnerving. So that way, it’s quite chaotic for me as well as it comes around my own identity as an Indian and a Sikh man. 

You’re all very different individuals and you’ve had a whole life before you came together as Excise Dept making music and building an idea of what you write music about, how does all that come together?

Rounak - If you listen to most of the music on this album, it’s a little bit of an outlet for us. None of us have had difficult lives so far. One aspect of it is exactly what KJ just said about witnessing your country and the people around you in constant flux, but the other aspect is also how our individual work and practices have been; while we’re all quite joyous in our friendship, we’re still a little skeptical about how our respective fields come in. I mean, Sid and I have been doing music for what I think is a fairly long time, and I feel like I’ve been quite frustrated with the way things have gone, KJ also has been in the photo world and is now foraying into films, and it's the same with every community where it comes with a lot of baggage. I think I have really felt a little alienated with these words that we use so casually, like “community”, “identity”, “scene” or any umbrella term that pre-supposes that everybody that fits into it must come together is something don’t fuck with. This feels different, because we’re not trying to build a community, it’s something based on kinship and friendship. 

I mean, do I think I’m the best musician in the world? No. Is Sid the best engineer in the world? No. Is KJ the best rapper in the world?

KJ - Fuck yeah dude!

Rounak - It’s not even about being the best, it’s about this relationship between us that we cultivate. For me, it was the desire to build that. In fact, [Andrew] Sabu is the most industry-facing person, he’s managed artists, he’s booked them for festivals and so much more, and he’s worked on stuff like this before. 

Andrew - It’s very personal for me. I’m not really part of the music (yet), but my relationship with this is not work for me, of course, it is an extension of what I do, but it feels like I’m a part of this thing where I don’t have to feel the pressure building a community or making it great - it’s purely about the art and expression, and building into something that will reach a lot of people. 

Rounak - Also, the thing with a collective is a reference to the fact that we’re doing everything in a very self-sufficient way. We’re producing and funding everything by ourselves, we don’t outsource

Andrew - except for friends who supported us!

Rounak - Excise Dept in a larger sense is the three of us making music, of course, but there is also Sabu and Kevin, with whom we make a lot of our videos, and Dolo who helped KJ build our website and our graphic identity - so there’s a lot of people who are in and around this, but there isn’t a “scene” or a cool and branded place in any way. It’s just a small group of people coming together and that I think is where the idea of a “collective” comes in, and I think that’s why I think we often issue the use of our names and put too much focus on our faces. It’s not really that important at the end of the day. 

KJ - I studied to be a photo-journalist and a documentary photographer, and sometimes that world felt like such a purist way of looking at things. These guys, they don’t feel weird representing somebody in a different light. For them, ideas of representation are not even a thing to think about. Later in discourses, we learnt about this but generally, even being a photographer you had to always market yourself with an identity marker, like “oh, I’m a Sikh photographer”, or  “I’m a queer Sikh photographer”. It’s how many things you can put before your name to be looked at. Nobody was seeing my work for what it was and when I moved to India and started working here, I realized I wasn’t getting to make the body of work I wanted to make or talk about things I wanted to talk about because I’m always working for someone. But with Excise Dept, at least visually, I was given full reign to just take it as far as I could and you know, use the same archives that I have had in my family, or Rounak’s archives. I get to work in a manner where it’s like we say we want to try something and we do it. Having that process helps us understand why we did everything that we did, and it helps us train our intuitions also which I think as an approach, I was missing in my line of work. Excise Dept is really just a space for us to come in and fully be ourselves, try things out and see what works and what doesn’t, and that’s why I think we’ve gained a strong visual and sonic identity because it just feels like it’s coming from a very honest and vulnerable place. 

I may be reverse engineering this in a strange way, but after alllll this, can you give us a little bit of history on how Excise Dept happened and how it all come by?

KJ - It started very organically. I mean, these guys had come over to Delhi and Rounak was about to play at Magnetic Fields with Sid, and that day I don’t know, we just started doing random things. I went and rapped in Punjabi, and it just fit. Dude, my work is totally different. Even now, I don’t feel like I’m a rapper! For me, Excise is purely a visual project… always. The rap I’m able to somehow do, and Rounak encourages certain aspects of it where he tells me to do this, and do that so I’m always taking cues from him to rap. But generally, everything I’m rapping about, I’m thinking about visually. After Magnetics Fields, the country started to really change, the world started to change. Once we were all home, I was in Delhi, Rounak, Sabu and Sid were in Bombay. They were constantly meeting up, making beats and they’d send me something. Sitting in Delhi, going through a very serious illness and through Covid, I was left to watch things on the internet and then feel all these things - little by little, it lyrically became an outlet. Visually also, I started pulling a lot from old family news archives from the 80s and 90s. And slowly, we started stacking up a list of songs together. A lot of the songs were just about having fun, chilling out and with no particular agenda in mind but definitely coming from a place of frustration and trying to just give it a canvas to exist on. 

Rounak - There is no better way to say it, it was all very organic.It was no real mission or anything. I mean, now, with this album, we have an idea of what this really is. I think for a long time, it was a pretty tentative place, and we were just doing it for fun. Sabu was actually an instrumental person because he really brought in that focus that “ok, this is a real project and we’re going to have some goals and a timeline”. Now, it has this momentum that we’re riding a little bit, but it just came out very naturally. Me and KJ have known each other for half our lives, we went to school together, we’re been close for a long time. He’s been doing his visual work, I’ve been doing my music. Sid and I have known each other for 6 or 7 years, we’ve made music together, he’s toured with the Rounak Maiti band for a few years traveling the country. Sabu and I have made a bunk of music together and I’ve produced for him before. We’ve all known each other a long time, and so we’re quite tight. This music thing comes out of that. It’s just a part of our friendship now. 

Andrew - The way I see it, in the last 4 years, this is the most stable thing in my life. I have a very technical story to tell about the origin of things. I knew Rounak and Sid, we were chilling in the pandemic. I didn’t even know who KJ was. I knew him and Rounak were close friends, and by then they’d also made a bunch of demos together, and I think they’d also had a little DJ set at a friend’s art space in Bombay. Rounak once made me listen to a couple of those demos, and I heard Pardes, which is on the album, and I wonderland who this guy was (which turned out to be KJ). I know he really undermines himself as a rapper, which is alright, but for me, he’s one of the top 5 rappers in the country. I’ve said it so many times, and he undermines that because you know, he didn’t do it with the intention of being the next big rapper or anything. But he doesn’t see what I see as an artist manager. At the time, I had just put a pause on my ongoing projects to focus on my own music and making music with these guys and it just became a thing. It became a thing I also really wanted to pursue as something I believe in and fuck with, and feel like this could really evolve into something. But like Rounak said, in the first 2 years Rounak moved to Delhi, I moved to Bangalore, we were just on the fringes sending demos here and there. Then in 2023, it was “year 0” like I call it, we did put stuff out before so we had a discography in place before we put Billo out which felt like this really special song which felt like a straight up banger. Then we said “okay, this needs to be a full album”. 

KJ - And in the middle we made a fucking short film, man! 

Andrew - All these questions you’re asking, we’ve been trying to answer for the last couple of years and now it’s getting narrowed down. The biggest thing that people ask me is “WHO is Excise Dept?” and “What do they do?”, and kind of did that intentionally!

KJ - Anytime someone wants to silo us down, I feel like I want to shapeshift and do something else. 

Andrew - A lot of people say Excise is a collective, or a visual thing, or a trio. We don’t really know what this will evolve into now. 

KJ - In my circle of people, they didn’t even know I make music. They were all “oh, we thought Excise Dept was more like a video production company”, and I’m like, “theek hai, badiya” (alright then, great!). We don’t want to be siloed into one particular place. I just want to keep making things, and making them honestly. 

In true interview fashion, my last question is simply - what’s next?

Rounak - There is a lot of music in the pipeline. We’re going to explore all the different genres we’re presenting. In a sense, this is the first cohesive, “hard launch” for the group. I think after this, we want to make more music. We want to make more like this album, conceptually driven music which is driven by a binding theme. This is the first ideological release, and within this there are micro things to bring out more. For instance, the melodic, folk inspired stuff, or going full hip-hop, or full weird experimental, or only pop bangers. I think we want to do a lot more of features and collaborations.

Andrew - Volume two will have a lot of features!

Rounak - The artists we’re performing in Delhi and Bombay for the album launch, we want to work with a lot of them. We love and respect their work. 

KJ - More films coming! 

Rounak - Visually also, we’re working on our next short film, that’s our next big project and that’ll also be completely made and produced, scored and shot by Excise Dept. 

ALL - To blow up. That’s the plan!